Do Scandanavians make good slaves?

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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Occluded Sun wrote:I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore.
I think that means I win the Internet.
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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

I'm sticking with my previous statement - the best slaves are whatever humans are cheap and available, it has nothing to do with who is or is not suited to whatever climate, to growing crops on a given thermocline or whatever else.

Now, if we return to OgreBattle's original question, but read it as:
OgreBattle (paraphrased) wrote: In an alternate timeline where super cold environments get colonized with brutal chattel slavery, would tall blonde slave women strain suspension of disbelief?
And the answer is no. People would basically accept the premise.

Image
Sure, whatever.

We haven't done an experiment with many parallel earths where we see how often genocidal sea peoples show up different places and murder the natives with whatever degree of success, so for anyone to speak with any confidence about why that happened in the Anglosphere but not in Africa: technology, culture of either the victims or perpretators, diseases in either population, quality of agricultural land and etc. is completely unjustified. We don't know why. Malaria is a weak explanation, the immense agricultural productivity of North America a stronger one.

But, personally, I think Northern Europeans are genetically predisposed towards monstrous out-group violence (as an indirect consequence of selective pressure from our exceptionally brutal history, like the 30 years war and such), and simply didn't time the colonization of South Africa properly. The Anglosphere is characterized by genocidal settler-colonialism because of English savagery and everything else is happenstance.

Now, to be fair, Occluded Sun has contributed something very useful to the discussion - OgreBattle can use his posts as dialogue for the slavers, because they absolutely would discuss whether they could get more cold-tolerant or docile or lower-calorie-requirement slaves at this or another place, and if those would be better slave stock.

But from a practical standpoint they'd take whoever they could get. Slavers can't be choosers.
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Post by Fwib »

DrPraetor wrote:We haven't done an experiment with many parallel earths where we see how often genocidal sea peoples show up different places and murder the natives with whatever degree of success,
I dunno about slavery (there probably was a whole bunch of it), but we totally have evidence of Murderous Sea Peoples in this earth. :)
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

@DrPraetor

We do know why. It just hasn't been a popular explanation. 'How the West was Won' sounds so much more mythic than 'How the post-apocalyptic Americas were squatted before indigenous populations could recover'.

Squanto (you remember him as the Thanksgiving Indian who spoke English and saved the Pilgrims) experienced it first hand. The settlers themselves repeatedly made the point that it seemed like a garden because it had been less than a generation ago.
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Post by DrPraetor »

'The poor natives died from disease' sounds better than 'a bunch of Puritans murdered the survivors.'

You can propose that deaths from disease were a necessary condition, but:
Image

clearly not a sufficient condition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph ... nic_groups

And, even then, there is:
[*] Ample factual dispute over how much of the population decline in NA or Australia was due to disease, and how much due to the sheer savagery of European settlers.
[*] Only one comparison case (Rhodesia, South Africa) in which you had Anglo settler colonialism without waves of Small Pox, which was also 100s of years later and collapsed under international pressure.

So, no, we do not "know why" European settler-colonialists succeeded in displacing the native population in either NA or Australia.
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Or, you know, you could Read the Article that Has Your Graph.

But yes, death from disease is a well established pre-condition for successful settler colonialism.

We also know why American indigenous populations were more vulnerable to Old World diseases (since there was no similar introduction of New World diseases to Europe). We also know some of the reasons that technology spread more slowly in the New World than it did in the Old World. Certainly one of the more enjoyable and accessible books on the subject is 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. Long story short, it turns out that conquest had nothing to do with Genetic or Cultural superiority.
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Post by Chamomile »

The Han Dynasty and the Mongols both conducted genocides in the pursuit of expanding their empire. More recently, Japan and China's behavior wasn't exactly cuddly towards their neighbors in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and while there had been cultural exposure to Europeans at the time, there definitely wasn't a whole lot of genetic intermingling going on. Violence between Middle-Easterners has been utterly incessant since they invented history over 5000 years ago. There's nothing uniquely European about out-group violence and brutality, nor did much of Europe pass through any greater genetic bottleneck of violence than other civilizations' periods of chaos and war.

To say nothing of the genetic improbability of an event like the Thirty Years' War causing an evolutionary bottleneck favoring a predisposition towards outgroup violence. The Thirty Years' War lasted, as the name implies, about a generation in a half, so in order to exert any serious evolutionary pressure it would have to have overwhelmingly killed people who were unwilling to resort to out-group violence, but A) we don't even know what proportion of the population was killed through direct murder and it was probably much smaller than the proportion killed through famine and disease, and B) people who were directly murdered were the people who were living in a Protestant/Catholic town when a Catholic/Protestant army rolled in to torch it. Their willingness to hypothetically be a part of a Protestant/Catholic army to do the same thing to Catholic/Protestant villages had absolutely no impact on whether or not the village they were in got torched, nor will those who escape such massacres be at all genetically predisposed towards greater outgroup violence.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

DrPraetor wrote: Now, to be fair, Occluded Sun has contributed something very useful to the discussion - OgreBattle can use his posts as dialogue for the slavers, because they absolutely would discuss whether they could get more cold-tolerant or docile or lower-calorie-requirement slaves at this or another place, and if those would be better slave stock.

But from a practical standpoint they'd take whoever they could get. Slavers can't be choosers.
Ah, but they do respond to market pressures. It does take time and effort to capture people and transport them to market - and if no one's willing to buy a particular type of slave, slavers aren't going to go out of their way to acquire them. If an ethnicity develops a reputation for not lasting long as workers, that ethnicity's going to be less in demand.

It might be useful to put American slavery of Africans aside, and look to the ancient Mediterranean world. Rome had slavery for centuries, and they certainly believed that people from different ethnicities / cultures were suited for different types of slavery. Whether true or not, there were common beliefs about what people made the best slaves, and buying patterns would follow those beliefs and preferences.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I'd also like to point out that suggesting Europeans have a greater intolerance for out-groups than other people is absurd when you consider history. Not that they don't have any intolerance, but they're much more tolerant than most peoples have been, especially in the modern era. I suspect "the grass is greener on the other side" thinking in this. People in the past were gross bigots, people in other cultures are generally MUCH more bigoted and intolerant of outsiders, and past people in other cultures might as well have been living in a different, hateful world.
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:white people are better than everyone else at everything, including being slaves
There's nothing Pseudo about you, Stupidity. Even a cursory analysis of my comments suggests that there would be far more obvious candidates for "best at everything" than Europeans.

Imagine a society that has been 'civilized' for longer than anyone else on the planet, that has coped with high population pressures for centuries, that developed the sciences beyond the rest of the world for as long, that has citizens that outperform not only the human average but European-derived peoples on tests of intelligence and intellectual ability, and whose lower classes were historically famous for being low-cost, high-performance laborers - and were used as such in our society. Wouldn't they be the clear candidates for the category you established?

Can you think of any people that fits that description, Stupidity?
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Post by deaddmwalking »

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The world today seems absolutely crackers,
With nuclear bombs to blow us all sky high.
There's fools and idiots sitting on the trigger.
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Their Zen, their ping-pong, their yin, and yang-ese.

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They only come up to your knees...
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Pseudo Stupidity
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Post by Pseudo Stupidity »

Occluded Sun wrote:
Pseudo Stupidity wrote:white people are better than everyone else at everything, including being slaves
There's nothing Pseudo about you, Stupidity. Even a cursory analysis of my comments suggests that there would be far more obvious candidates for "best at everything" than Europeans.

Imagine a society that has been 'civilized' for longer than anyone else on the planet, that has coped with high population pressures for centuries, that developed the sciences beyond the rest of the world for as long, that has citizens that outperform not only the human average but European-derived peoples on tests of intelligence and intellectual ability, and whose lower classes were historically famous for being low-cost, high-performance laborers - and were used as such in our society. Wouldn't they be the clear candidates for the category you established?

Can you think of any people that fits that description, Stupidity?
If there's one group of people who would make great slaves, it's communists. You know, all their rhetoric about how you just need to keep working hard and definitely never murder people who exploit you so you can create a worker's utopia.
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If you wanted to participate in a conversation, you've lost that right. You are a non-human now. You are over and cancelled. No concern of yours can ever matter to any member of the human race ever again.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Is this entire thread just bait?
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

JonSetanta wrote:Is this entire thread just bait?
Image
I just thought it was a pointless but not really mundane thing to ask as the folks here have interesting opinions and world building experience
Last edited by OgreBattle on Tue Jul 04, 2017 12:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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